Harley-Davidson can get millennials excited about its motorcycles. But when it comes to actually learning to ride hogs or smaller bikes, the largest generation isn't the most enthusiastic generation.

"There's a perception out there that riding is a major and difficult challenge and process, and it really isn't," Anoop Prakash, Harley-Davidson's director of marketing and market development for the United States, told me.

So Harley is kicking off the summer riding season by staging a concentrated promotion around ease of use. And to dramatize just how simple it is to learn to drive a Harley-Davidson, company marketers came up with the idea of "capturing" a small town and teaching every resident how to ride.

Harley took over tiny Ryder, N.D., on Saturday, cooperating with the mayor and other leaders of the farming hamlet of 85 people to get literally every eligible resident to agree to take motorcycle lessons. They staged a rally that drew a few hundred outsiders, as well. Only a handful of Ryder residents have motorcycles.

The company's inducements included giving the town's water tower a badly needed paint job and getting Mayor Jody Reinisch to allow the town to be called unofficially "Riders, N.D.," between now and Labor Day.

"They wanted to prove to America that they could come in and teach that motorcycle riding is a safe, family deal and teach people how to drive motorcycles safely," Reinisch told me. More than 50 Ryder residents -- the maximum number Reinisch figured actually qualified, being between the ages of 16 and 70 -- signed up for a driving and safety course that they'll wrap up by next month.

Harley also considered other places as likely suspects for the takeover, including Independence, Mo. But Mayor Reinisch is glad the Milwaukee-based company chose his town.

"Some citizens thought it was horrible that I was inviting Harley-Davidson to town," Reinisch said. "All we knew about motorcycles was biker gangs in movies, so they were scared. But Harley came and made a bunch of videos and took a lot of photographs, and before the event on Saturday, 100 percent of the town was behind us."

It helped that Harley-Davidson painted the water tower. The tower is reminiscent of the iconic structure at the company's manufacturing plant in Milwaukee. The company offered to paint the Ryder municipal tower if it could do so in Harley's orange and black colors and put the brand name on the back side.

"I said, 'Go for it,'" Reinisch recalled. "We didn't have the money to do it ourselves. In a small town with no economic development, we couldn't turn that down."

Already, the mayor said, some outsiders have made a bee line to Ryder to take their photos in front of the newly painted tower, whose image already has made its way into the digisphere. "I think it'll help our economy," he said.

More to the point for Harley-Davidson, of course, is to market its Ryder gambit. The company is using social channels to chronicle the experience and journey of the town's motorcycle students and plans to tell their story all the way through their invitation to the brand's national owners rally in Milwaukee on Labor Day weekend.

"We want to inspire people across the country to get off their own couches and learn to ride," Prakash said.

He said that discomfort with the prospect of learning to drive a motorcycle keeps more millennials out of Harley showrooms than it did previous generations. Many of Harley's oldest customers have cultural appreciation, at least, of the popularization of motorcycles as military vehicles during World War II and "other things happening around motorcycling through their lives that helped build a strong ridership base in that baby-boomer group."

But among millennials especially, Prakash said, "there's a perception that learning to ride is a lot harder than it is. No doubt it involves the building of a lifetime skill, but at the same time, it comes intuitively. If someone has a driver's license and can ride a bike, they can learn [to drive a motorcycle] over the weekend and build up their confidence and skill over time."